Sunday, October 28, 2018

Little fuselage pieces become bigger fuselage pieces

Today was one of those pretty satisfying days.  Lots of part came together and I didn't screw up anything that couldn't be easily fixed.  That's after spending about 8 hours in the garage!  Good day.


This is the passenger area.  The ribs on the left form the bottom of the seats and the black area is where the feet go.

Adding bulkheads one at a time working my way back.

Its hard to see in this picture but this section of the fuselage is only the passenger seating area, and the baggage area and its still over 6 feet tall.  Yes, that's the Seahawks game going on in the background.

This is the same section after I moved it to the floor so I could attach the floor skins.

Monday, October 22, 2018

Black Primer?

There are only a few parts of the fuselage that will be visible to the passenger in the section that I am working on now.  Most of these parts are sub floors, and interior supports.  However, there are still a few parts and I remember having a hard time with the painting process of the interior of the 9 so I decided to prime the visible parts with an almost black epoxy primer.  My hope is that the final coat will be tougher than on the 9 (less susceptible to scratching) but even if it does get scratched I hope that will be less visible with a dark primer under it.

This past week or so I have been priming, dimpling, deburring, and assembling the various bulkheads in the fuselage.  Here is the progress thus far.

Rear seat inner tunnel bulkhead panels.  These will be down in the foot well and as you can see have the front seat belt attach points riveted to them.  The holes at the bottom of the panels are where the rear seat heat will come from.

Its pretty hard to see the dark panels against the carpet but all 4 of the footwell panels are cleco'd in and you can finally start to see some structure come together.


Side view but even here it's still hard to see. 

Monday, October 8, 2018

Fuselage bulkheads

This week I spend most of my time working on the bulkheads for the fuselage.  This is particularly relaxing because its simple follow the instructions type stuff.  I also have very little priming to do on this section of the fuselage because it will never see water.  The tail-cone does get wet inside when it rains as water rolls down the vertical stabilizer, under the fairing and into the tail-cone.  However there is no place for water to normally enter the forward section of the fuselage so I don't plan on priming anything that is Al-clad.

This is the set up I use to rivet the big 470 rivets on the spar carrier bulkhead.  You can see the rivets set in their holes but you can't see the scotch tape that I used on the back side to hold them there while I drive them from above with the rivet gun stabilized by the C-Frame.  This makes for some very consistent and strong rivets.

This is the other end of the spar carrier where I have completed the riveting process.

Here is the rear portion of the spar carrier bulkhead.  You can see that it has several seat rail brackets as well as a couple of stiffeners that get riveted and bolted on.  In this picture I had already completed riveting the two outside supports similar to the first two pictures.